Outtakes from the Sketchbook “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” pg. 21 is a new print edition by Rita Ackermann produced on the occasion of Printed Matter / St Marks’ and 8-Ball Community’s 2022 East Village Zine Fair.
For Outtakes from the Sketchbook “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” pg. 21, Ackermann has adapted a unique work on paper into an eight layer screen print, including three additional layers made from new drawings on mylar, translating her characteristic erasing and additive process into a new medium. The original drawing for the screen print was adapted from the outtakes of one of Ackermann’s sketchbooks now being published as a five volume series by American Art Catalogues. The title of the print refers to this origin.
Printed by Keigo Takahashi in Brooklyn, NY.
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From Ackermann: “I was asked to give a little background of my history with the East Village; here are some memories of my very first years of moving to New York in 1992;
I was mostly just waitressing in the beginning. I had a full time job at a diner on 8th Street, the All American Cafe (I still remember the name because it was my first full time job), and on the weekends I worked in a very cool jazz bar/café, run by an Egyptian chef who was almost always high on heroin, and his girlfriend, a jazz singer who was also high on something. She was so talented that the finest jazz musicians of Lennox Lounge came down from Harlem to the East Village to play with her. But sadly the good days of that place ended quickly because one night someone pulled a knife on the Egyptian chef resulting in a drug or jealousy dispute and the place had to close down.
Later I quit waitressing and moved to Ludlow Street right next to the legendary Max Fish Bar where they let me paint the windows for free drinks. I also sold my t-shirt and underwear designs to Liquid Sky, a Rave Music and clothing store on Lafayette Street…I could say that the tees and pants were a hit in the Downtown scene, and also the Max Fish windows attracted some art traffic, which makes me humbly recognize that I would have never made it to the art scene without the enormous supporting force of NYC’s bohemian downtown.”
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Born in Hungary and based in New York, Rita Ackermann attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest before emigrating to the United States in the early 1990s. At once graceful and gestural, her vivid works oscillate between figuration and abstraction as forms appear and disappear on the canvas. Ackermann often starts by freely drawing onto raw canvas—in a similar technique to the automatic drawings of the Dadaists—only to later obscure the lines with layers of oil paint.
Ackermann’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Sweden; Sammlung Friedrichshof, Burgenland, Austria; the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; the Ludwig Museum, Budapest; the Swiss Institute, New York; and the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas. Ackermann’s work is held in prominent public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Maria Leuff Foundation, New York; the Hessel Foundation, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; the Zabludowicz Collection, London; Museum Het Domein, the Netherlands; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
